Module 1, Concepts of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

The size of a file depends on the amount of data it contains. Let’s take the example of a database file:

• A database file is an organised collection of data that usually consists of a number of separate parts called records. Each record consists of a set of related data fields, which together can be treated as a unit. If you think of an entry in an address book as a record, then each part of that entry (i.e. name, job title, address, telephone number, etc) is a field.
  
  
• Data entered into a field is made up of characters, so each field will contain a certain number of bytes of data. As a given number of fields make up each record and a given number of records make up the whole file, you can see that the size of a database file depends on the following:
  
  
• The number of records in the file.
• The number of fields in each record.
• The number of characters entered into each field.
  
  
• This determines the number of bytes of data that make up the file, and thus the file size. You can see that even with relatively few records, the size of a database file could be several thousand bytes (or several kilobytes).